British forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo will receive a new, highly automated communications network designed to reduce staffing requirements. Part of an ambitious 28-week program by the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence, it will replace a manpower-intensive system currently in use, allowing roughly 260 Royal Signal Corps personnel to be reassigned. Made entirely from commercial technologies, all elements must be in place and operational by late August before the harsh Balkan winter begins.

Communications specialists are proposing that the U.S. Forces-Korea change engineering and management approaches and follow the lead of commercial Internet service providers. The plan offers wide area network transmission bandwidth between the global defense information infrastructure and command, control, communications, computers and intelligence systems users on the Korean Peninsula, and it addresses several problems with the existing data network there.

The drive to speed new military information system technologies to the field, coupled with an increased reliance on commercial off-the-shelf products, is posing new interoperability problems for communicators. Many of these systems must interoperate in an increasingly networked environment with legacy equipment or foreign counterparts in coalition operations.

A single secure global information grid is emerging to greatly increase U.S. and allied combat power. This overarching system-of-systems approach recognizes that each unique platform, weapon system, computer, radio, piece of equipment and warrior is also part of a much greater network.

Until recently, battlefield information systems were viewed merely as enablers to conventional military operations. Only a decade ago, their buzzwords were "force multiplier." Since the Gulf War, which demonstrated the value of Western high-technology supremacy, information systems have steadily increased in importance, shedding their supporting roles for leads in the growing variety of military operations.

There are a number of emerging technologies and methods of applying them that will help the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the U.S. Defense Department as we build the foundation for network-centric operations, two of which are convergence and Web services. DISA is pursuing the acquisition of services and capabilities employing these technologies with techniques such as capacity-on-demand and managed services.

Military and government decision makers convene at the Washington, D.C., Convention Center next month to discuss requirements in current operations and to explore hundreds of technical solutions. TechNet International 2005, which takes place May 17-19, will address the issues that commanders know from experience are real challenges facing warfighters today.

As the war on terrorism enters its fourth year, experts offer that the U.S. government can congratulate itself for successfully launching a number of bold initiatives to protect national security.

The convergence of telephone and Internet protocol networks holds great promise, according to industry experts, leading vendors and the press. However, an increasingly converged network also increases the risk factor associated with securing voice and other real-time communication streams. These risks are not limited to Internet-protocol-based networks; traditional time division multiplexing networks also are vulnerable.

U.S. Joint Forces Command is harnessing the power of extensible markup language to lash together three capabilities and to facilitate collaboration between intelligence and operations activities. If successful, the integrated capability would increase an individual warfighter's ability to control intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets and share targeting information, reducing the time between target identification and strike from minutes to seconds. Integration of those capabilities is in the experimental stage, but the project's director is encouraged by the initial results and believes it could eventually lead to humans on instead of in the targeting-strike loop.